In the height of summer, when the heat invites laziness and daydreaming, few pleasures rival the joy of embarking on a journey without leaving your armchair. Mauricio Wiesenthal offers precisely that in Orient-Express: The Train of Europe, a book that not only tells the history of a legendary train but masterfully reconstructs the soul of a Europe that almost exists only in memory and in well-written pages.
Published by Editorial Acantilado in 2020, this 384-page volume is a gem of book design: elegant, sober, and meticulously crafted, as befits a publisher that champions the beauty of the book as an object. The cover, with its evocative photography, already suggests the glamour and nostalgia that permeate its pages. It is a book meant to be read slowly, like someone gazing at the landscape from the window of a luxury carriage.
The Author: An Exceptional Witness
Mauricio Wiesenthal (Barcelona, 1943) is one of the last great European humanists from our country. A writer, essayist, lecturer, and former professor of Cultural History, his work is rooted in the finest Central European tradition. Of German descent, an indefatigable traveler and a deep connoisseur of European culture, Wiesenthal had already published in 1979 The Belle Époque of the Orient Express, but this 2020 volume is a more mature, ambitious, and personal work: a mosaic of history, memory, anecdotes, and reflection.
Wiesenthal is not a typical historian. He is a storyteller who has lived and breathed the cultured, cosmopolitan, and melancholic Europe he describes. His enveloping, fragrant, and precise prose exudes erudition without pedantry and nostalgia without sentimentality.
The Book: A Journey Through the Europe We Were
Orient-Express narrates the history of the train that, since 1883, linked Paris with Istanbul, becoming a symbol of a Europe united by culture, commerce, and the pleasure of travel. Through its carriages passed kings and spies, aristocrats and adventurers, writers and artists, lovers and fugitives. Wiesenthal reconstructs its stations, landscapes, aromas, menus, and, above all, its characters.
The book is a delightful hybrid of essay, chronicle, and memoir. It does not follow a strictly chronological order, but progresses like the train itself: with stops, surfacing memories, brilliant anecdotes, and cultured digressions. Within its pages, we find Agatha Christie and Mata Hari, dethroned kings and discreet diplomats, legendary chefs and anonymous engineers. But the true protagonist is Europe: that diverse, refined, and dialogic Europe largely destroyed by the wars, nationalism, and subsequent barbarities of the 20th century.
Wiesenthal elegantly and somewhat sadly defends the civilizing value of the train: a space for meeting, conversation, and suspended time. In contrast to the absurd speed of low-cost flights, the Orient-Express represented a way of understanding life: slow, attentive, sensual.
Summer Recommendation
If you cannot afford a grand journey this summer, Orient-Express is the best option. It will take you from Paris to Constantinople, passing through the Balkans and the Alps, without airport queues or delays. It is a book to read on the terrace at sunset, with a glass of fine wine (Wiesenthal is also an esteemed winemaker), allowing the words to rock you like the clattering of a first-class carriage.
For GoAragón Readers
For GoAragón readers, lovers of Aragonese culture in its broadest and deepest sense, this book will be of particular interest. Wiesenthal champions an idea of cultured, humanist, and diverse Europe that is also part of our finest tradition. Aragon, a land of passage and encounters, has always understood its vocation as a cultural bridge. In times of closed identities and express trips, Orient-Express reminds us that true wealth lies in the journey, in conversation, in respecting differences, and in the memory of what we were.
